Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [92]
Minutes ticked by. Men shivered inside the unheated squad cars. Everyone saw Dillinger when he emerged onto the sidewalk, steam curling from his mouth. Dillinger glanced at the parked cars. Several, he noticed, were pointed the wrong way. He opened the driver’s-side car door, slid behind the wheel, and told Billie to hang on. Before anyone could react, Dillinger threw the Essex into reverse, tires squealing as he backed the car directly into the thick of Irving Park Boulevard traffic.
Across the street, Detective Harder hollered for his driver to ram Dillinger’s car, but in his haste the car’s engine flooded. Dillinger threw the Essex into first and it shot forward, heading east on Irving Park, narrowly avoiding an onrushing car. Behind Dillinger only one of his pursuers, a car driven by a Chicago detective named John Artery, managed to give chase. Sitting beside Artery was Art Keller, the officer with orders to kill Dillinger. Artery pushed the accelerator to the floor and in seconds the officers’ car pulled abreast of Dillinger’s fleeing Essex. “Get down!” Dillinger shouted to Billie, who scrunched into the floorboards.
Keller leaned out a window and opened fire, emptying a .38 and then a shotgun into Dillinger’s car. Dillinger screeched right onto Elston Avenue. Keller’s car stayed with him. In the years to come those involved would inflate the ensuing chase to a multimile, half-hour marathon. In fact, the chase was relatively short, lasting maybe a mile. Keller leaned out the window, repeatedly firing into the Essex, but no one was hit. At one point, Dillinger swung a sharp right off Elston, then swerved into a dead-end street. Behind him Detective Artery didn’t react in time. He raced by the street even as Dillinger reversed the Essex, rocketed in the opposite direction, and made his escape. “That bird sure can drive,” Keller breathed.
Dillinger and Billie abandoned the bullet-riddled Essex on the North Side and took a cab to Russell Clark’s apartment, where the gang was holding an impromptu party, dancing to the tunes on a radio. Mary Kinder heard someone pounding on the door, opened it, and was surprised when Dillinger and Billie tumbled in. Dillinger was convinced it was a syndicate assassination attempt; not till the next morning’s papers were they certain their pursuers had been police.
Front-page stories of the shoot-out introduced Dillinger to thousands of Chicagoans. The Tribune, writing that Dillinger’s “prowess in crime has been compared to the James boys and Harvey Bailey,”19 passed on a breathless account of how police had traded shots with a machine gunner firing from an “unseen portal” within Dillinger’s car. In fact, Dillinger had never fired a shot; he was too busy driving. Several of the city’s six papers drew comparisons to Verne Miller’s escape sixteen days before.
While everyone had an idea who had betrayed them, Dillinger and Pierpont were certain it was Art McGinnis. They wasted no time clearing out of the Clarendon Avenue apartment, moving across town to Russell Clark’s. The Chicago police were right behind them; detectives raided the Clarendon flat the next day. Coincidentally, Dillinger’s old partner, Harry Copeland, whose heavy drinking made him a liability, was arrested the following night, after he had the stellar idea of pulling a gun on a woman with whom he was arguing outside a North Side bar. In his absence Pat Cherrington began sleeping with John Hamilton. Her sister Opal Long was already occupying Russell Clark’s bed.
Dillinger did not let police pressure disrupt